Black Star

by Robert Gandt

  “Sea Lord shows all red fighters turning cold. They’re bugging out.”

  So they were. On his datalink situation display, Maxwell saw the two blips moving back toward the mainland.

  Why? They hadn’t come close enough to the Chameleon to get a visual ID. Were the two Flankers waiting for reinforcements before engaging four Hornets?

  A new uneasiness passed over Maxwell. Something was happening. He didn’t believe in extra-sensory perception, but in twenty years of flying he had learned to trust his gut feelings. His gut was sending a persistent signal. Something was happening. What?

  In the next instant he knew.

  B.J. Johnson’s voice crackled on the radio. “Missile in the air! Runner One-one, six o’clock low, hot on the Ironclaw.”

  A jolt of adrenaline surged through him. His RWR was silent. “One’s naked.” Meaning he wasn’t targeted by radar.

  “Two’s naked.” No warning either.

  Maxwell saw it. A tiny plume, ahead and below, between him and the Chameleon. Against the dull blue of the sea, it looked like a distant ember.

  It’s targeting the decoy.

  With morbid fascination, Maxwell watched the plume close the distance to the Chameleon.

  Where did it come from? His eyes scanned the piece of sky where the plume had been when he first saw it. Then he scanned further back to where it must have been when B.J. called it.

  He did a rough calculation. If it was an AA-11 Archer, which moved at something better than Mach two, it would cover about—he scratched for an answer, then came up with it—1,500 feet every second. More or less.

  His eyes went to the empty sky over his left shoulder. If the Archer was launched five seconds ago, it would have come from—

  There. A glimmer, low, nearly abeam his port wing.

  It was between him and B.J. Johnson’s Hornet. He kept his eyes glued to spot in the sky, unwilling to blink. Yes, for sure, there was something.

  “Runner One-one is padlocked.” Informing his wingmen his eyes were locked onto something. What?

  As he watched, it faded from his vision.

  Maxwell was still staring at the spot when, in his peripheral vision, he sensed an orange burst beyond the nose of his Hornet.

  The missile had impacted the decoy.

  “Runner One-two,” came B.J. ’s voice, “Ironclaw has taken a hit!”

  Maxwell swung his gaze to where the decoy had been. It was gone. In its place was a roiling debris cloud, passing under the nose of Maxwell’s Hornet. Well, he thought, that was a hostile act if he ever saw one.

  He hauled the Hornet’s nose toward the empty space where he had last seen the glimmer. “Alpha Whiskey, Ironclaw is down. Runner One-one is engaged, neutral.”

  “Runner one-two, no joy, visual.” B.J. didn’t see the bandit, but she had visual contact with her flight leader.

  “Runner One-two, cross-turn, I’m low, engaged.” There was no time for explanations. He was having a hard enough time keeping sight of this bandit.

  In the left break, he picked it up again. The glimmer. Coming toward him.

  There was no shape to it, no definition. Only an ephemeral grayness, fading in and out of Maxwell’s vision.

  Again it vanished. Maxwell kept the Hornet’s nose aimed at the spot where he had last seen the object.

  The voice of B.J. Johnson came over his earphones. “Runner One-two’s cross turning high, visual, no joy, no joy. Where’s the bandit?”

  Good question, he thought. “Runner One-one, tally one, on my nose. Two, stay high and cover me. Three and Four, strip and bug east. Check six for spitters.” He was ordering B.J. to stay and support him while the second element bugged out of the fight. You can’t fight what you can’t see.

  Maxwell mashed down the weapons selector for AIM-9M. He turned to move the seeker circle over the place where he expected the stealth jet to be. To his surprise, he was getting an intermittent growl in his headset. He uncaged the seeker and it whistled a shreeeeee indicating a lock on the heat source.

  Was the Sidewinder’s heat-seeking head really tracking the invisible bandit?

  Yes, definitely. He could see the gray shape again inside the HUD-displayed seeker circle. It was closing, head-on. The range was close for a head-on. It might be his only shot.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  Whoom! The two hundred pound Sidewinder leaped from the left wing tip rail.

  “Fox Two,” Maxwell called, signaling the launch of a Sidewinder. With his eyes he followed the faint gray corkscrew trail of the missile. It would lead him to the bandit.

  “Runner One, you’re targeted!” called B.J. Johnson. “Missile in the air, on your nose.”

  Shit! The bandit had just taken his own shot. Now he was defensive. He could only hope his Sidewinder found its target.

  He broke hard to the left, grunting against the G-force. The missile had to be another heat seeker. He was still getting no radar warning. He jabbed the flares dispenser, sending out a trail of incendiary decoys. Although he was belly-up to the missile coming at him he knew roughly where it had to be.

  Maxwell tightened his rolling pull, continuing through inverted. Digging out the back side of the maximum-G barrel roll, the G force smashed him into the seat. The G-suit squeezed his legs and abdomen like a hydraulic vice, keeping the blood in his head and not pooling in his lower extremities.

  Still, his vision was tunneling down. He tightened his leg muscles, fighting to stay conscious against eight times the force of gravity. Sweat poured from under his helmet, stinging his eyes.

  He rolled wings level, still pulling the jet to its computer-limited G load. The missile should be in terminal guidance. He had to see it. It should be—

  There. Up and to the left. Passing aft of his wing line.

  He relaxed his pull on the stick and gasped in relief. The missile had gone stupid. He was still alive.

  He swung his attention back to the forward quarter. Where was the bandit? He had to be out there—

  He was. Dead ahead and close. So close, he thought for a moment they would collide.

  As the shimmering apparition flashed past on his left, Maxwell got his first good glimpse of the aircraft. He saw it clearly for less than a second, but it was enough. In that instant he felt as though he were peering through a window to his past. He was back in a place five years ago, in the high desert of Nevada. It was all there, as in a dream.

  The diamond shape. No vertical tail.

  The Black Star.

  Or a damned good knock off. And it was trying to kill him.

  “Runner One-two is still visual no joy,” called B.J. Johnson from directly overhead. “You got a tally on the bandit?”

  “Affirmative. He just passed down my left side. I’m engaged, left hand turn.” He hauled the Hornet’s nose across the Black Star’s tail, peering back over his shoulder to keep it in sight. It was gone. He kept his turn in, but relaxed his pull. He squinted, scanning the horizon for the telltale shimmer.

  “Runner One-two, scan in front of me for that shimmer. I think we’re in a single circle flow.”

  “Two’s looking.”

  Where the hell is it? He felt like he was in a knife fight in a blackened room. The other guy could see him, but he was blind.

  Maxwell felt a stab of fear. It’s out there somewhere. It would fire another—

  “Runner One, I see something. The shimmer is at your ten to eleven o’clock, maybe a mile, closing.

  Okay, he knew where the bandit was, but he still didn’t have a visual. The Black Star had made a level turn in a single circle flow. Turning inside of him.

  “Skipper, he’s pulling lead on you. Two’s rolling in with guns.”

  Maxwell cursed and yanked on the stick. It had been a mistake, relaxing his turn after the head-on pass. He gave the bastard some turning room.

  He glimpsed the grayish silhouette. Coming at him again. As he stared, the shimmering image faded from view.

  A flas
h caught his eye. Cannon! Behind the strobing muzzle flash shimmered the amorphous shape of the Black Star.

  “Tracers, tracers! Guns defense!” B.J. was screaming in the radio.

  Instinctively, Maxwell rolled out and pulled the nose of the Hornet up and away from the Black Star. Out of the enemy’s turning plane. He hunched down in the cockpit, waiting for the cannon shells to shred his jet. It was a high deflection shot. At such an acute angle, the guy couldn’t possibly hit him.

  Thunk. Thunk. It felt like a giant hammer walloping the airframe of the Hornet.

  The Chinese pilot, whoever he was, was no amateur. He was getting hits from a nearly ninety-degree angle. Maxwell turned harder, again grunting against the force of the Gs. The tracer arcs were falling behind him. The deflection angle and the Gs were too great for the Chinese pilot to keep tracking him.

  The winking strobe of the cannon extinguished. The Black Star was again invisible.

  Maxwell’s Hornet was rocketing upwards. He rolled right to see B.J. ’s jet diving down towards the Black Star, cannon fire blazing from the nose.

  B.J. ’s voice crackled over the radio. “Runner One-two’s lost sight.”

  That was it. Time to get of Dodge. Turn tail and run. It was an inglorious way to end a fight, but Maxwell knew they had no option. If they stayed, the Black Star would kill him and, probably, his wingman.

  Their only hope was in the superior acceleration of the Hornet. Still in afterburner, he pointed the jet’s nose toward the empty hole in space where he had last glimpsed the Black Star. With its two F-414 engines at full thrust, the Hornet was approaching supersonic speed.

  “Roger. Bug out, bug out. One’s visual. Come hard left to a one-thirty heading. I’m high at your ten o’clock.”

  “Two’s visual.”

  “Runner One-two maintain that heading. One’s shackling for position.”

  Maxwell pulled his jet across the top of his wingman in a hard S-turn for spacing. He rolled out into a tight combat spread position.

  With their noses down, in full afterburner, they accelerated through mach one, in the opposite direction the Black Star had been headed. It would be tough for the Chinese pilot to reverse his turn in time to catch them and get a missile off.

  Maxwell knew it was luck that the guy hadn’t killed him with the Archer. B.J.’s tally call had saved him. It was more luck that he hadn’t killed him with the cannon. He had a feeling he’d used up his luck.

  He craned his neck, peering around. No sign of the Black Star. No missile in the air.

  He went back inside, scanning the panel. He had taken at least two hits. What was the damage? No red lights, no warnings—

  His fuel quantity. It was decreasing rapidly.

  B.J. Johnson confirmed it. “Runner One-one, you’re streaming fuel.”

  Maxwell shook his head. All in all, this was turning into a very shitty day. He was in a full afterburner dash to outrun an invisible enemy. And he would be out of gas in—he did a rough calculation—ten minutes. Maybe less.

  “Stay with me, Runner One-two. We’ll do a battle damage check after we’ve put some distance behind us. Alpha Whiskey, Runner One-one and One two need the tanker, no delay.”

  “We copy all that, Runner. Oilcan is on station Bravo Lima. He bears zero-nine-zero degrees, eighty miles. Can you make it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got battle damage and a fuel leak.”

  “Alpha Whiskey roger. We’re launching the SAR helo now.”

  He would have to come out of afterburner before the thirsty engines sucked his tanks dry. He could only pray that the Black Star wasn’t still in hot pursuit.

  It would be close. He knew Boyce wouldn’t order the tanker to come any closer. If the Black Star was still out there, it could pick them all off.

  Five minutes elapsed. No longer in afterburner, Maxwell’s Hornet slowed back to subsonic speed.

  The digital readout in the HUD indicated 410 knots.

  While Maxwell flew a direct course for the tanker, B.J. Johnson flew a criss-cross pattern behind him. The second section, Gordon and Miller, rejoined their flight leader. They remained high, off his starboard wing.

  No missile alerts. No more wispy gray telltale trails of an incoming heat seeker. The Black Star was gone, or he was setting them all up for a turkey shoot.

  Maxwell’s fuel totalizer was reading five hundred pounds when he acquired a visual ID on the tanker. Less than three minutes of fuel. At this low quantity, the gauges were inaccurate. It could be off by more than three hundred pounds.

  “Oilcan, Runner One-one is closing. Start a left turn and give me the drogue.”

  “Oilcan is way ahead of you, Runner,” said the tanker pilot. “Drogue’s out, and here comes your turn.”

  The tanker was a three-engine KC-10, an Air Force version of the civilian DC-10 transport. Fifty feet behind the big jet streamed the drogue, the three-foot basket at the end of a flexible hose.

  Maxwell ignored the persistent low fuel warning while he flew an intercept curve toward the turning tanker. He knew the indication had to be zero. At best, he’d get one shot at the drogue.

  He extended the Hornet’s in-flight refueling probe, affixed to the starboard fuselage. The gray mass of the big tanker swelled in his windshield.

  Hurry, he told himself. No time for niceties like checking out the condition of the basket, like getting himself stabilized in position before easing the probe into the drogue. Hurry.

  Fifty feet. Don’t overshoot. He fanned the Hornet’s speed brake.

  He kept the jet moving, sliding into position behind the tanker. The drogue was dancing around in the slipstream of the turning tanker. The trick was not to chase the wiggling basket, but aim for the center of its movement. It was easy, when you had lots of gas for another try.

  Twenty feet. Any second now the engines would gulp the last of the fuel. The whine of the turbines would go silent. The Hornet would be a glider.

  Ten feet. The drogue was twitching around in the right quarter of his canopy. Hurry. If he missed—

  The probe hit the rim of the basket, glanced off like a basketball on a hoop, then skittered into the opening.

  Klunk. He felt the probe make solid mechanical contact with the refueling nozzle in the drogue. A ripple passed along the length of the hose as the probe shoved the drogue forward. Fuel began to flow down the hose, through the probe, into the Hornet’s empty tanks.

  Maxwell felt the pent-up tension peel away from him. The tanker could deliver fuel faster than he was losing it. He’d make it back to the Reagan.

  “Good shot,” said the tanker pilot. “No swimming for you today, Navy. The United States Air Force is taking you back to your boat. Tell you what. We’re gonna have you sing the Air Force song on the way.”

  “No way,” said Maxwell.

  “Okay, we’re flexible. You just hum the tune, and we’ll sing.”

  CHAPTER 9 — DONG-JIN

  Taipei, Taiwan

  0935, Friday, 12 September

  Incredible, thought Huang. Wireless technology. He still had trouble believing such a thing actually existed. The signal on the satellite phone was clear, no static, no interruptions. With such a device he could converse with anyone in mainland China—with whom Taiwan was at war—as easily as he could with a member of his staff in Taipei.

  “What is the problem?” said the voice on the other end. “Who is in charge there?”

  Huang bristled at the harsh tone. As the second-highest official in Taiwan’s government, he was not pleased to be addressed in such disrespectful language.

  He forced himself to keep his voice neutral. “Madame Soong continues to occupy the executive office, General. She has not yet resigned.”

  “That is preposterous. You assured us she would be gone within a day after Li was dead.”

  “So we expected. She seems determined to remain the head of state.”

  “And make war on the People’s Republic of China. A madwoman!” Ts
in’s voice was rising in a crescendo. “Have you and the other ministers lost your manhood? Why haven’t you removed her?”

  Huang held the earpiece of the satellite telephone away from him. He didn’t want to tell General Tsin the truth—that the ministers were supporting Soong and not him, the Premier. “It is not a simple matter, General, deposing a President who refuses to step down.”

  “Why did you not warn us of such a development?”

  He knew where this conversation was going. He had never met General Tsin in person, but he was well acquainted with the fiery officer’s style. Tsin had risen to command of the PLA in the classic Chinese communist tradition. He overtook his competitors by eliminating them. Those he could not displace, he managed to label as traitors and had them, one at a time, arrested and tried.

  One of the hallmarks of Tsin’s long career was his abiding obsession to return Hong Kong and Taiwan to the sphere of the PRC. Hong Kong had come with relative ease, the result of long negotiation. Dealing with the dispirited Great Britain was like eroding a stone with dripping water. The former colony was returned to China in 1997.

  Taiwan was another matter. Instead of clinging to the mantle of a decaying empire, it had thrived as a protectorate of the United States. Indeed, the status of Taiwan had been an ongoing source of tension between the PRC and the U.S. for half a century.

  Five years ago General Tsin had cultivated Franklin Huang as a compliant negotiating partner. When Taiwan became a part of mother China, Huang was to be installed as the provincial governor.

  At least, that had been the understanding. It hinged, of course, on his assuming the presidency after Li’s untimely death in the Airbus. It should have been only a formality. He would replace the Vice President who would have the good sense to step down when confronted with the gravity of Taiwan’s situation.

  She didn’t step down. She declared war.

  “It was a surprise to all of us,” said Huang. “She gave no indication that she would initiate military action.”

  “You have made a serious misjudgment, Huang. Now you must correct your mistake. If you do not, I promise you that you will end your career gathering shit in the worst of China’s collective pig farms.”